Single Saturdays: March 18th, 2023

Single Saturdays is Five Cent Sound’s new weekly roundup, where our staff members share a song that they’ve fallen in love with and make their case for why others should give it a listen.

“Got the world at your fangs” - Frog

Gavin miller

Imagine you’re a blade of wheat flowing in the great field of life. Wind flutters around you. The quiet rush of a stream echoes in the distance. A frog rests at your base. Life is good.

If I could encapsulate this feeling–that of flowing to the natural force of life–I would do so using the song “Got the World at Your Fangs” by Frog. Daniel Bateman’s charming lead vocals flourish over a simple electric drum beat and bright guitar work. Bells and backing pianos turn the simple tune into an anthemic masterpiece, with the replayability of old folk classics. Frog’s 2019 record Count Bateman isn’t purely a folk record and neither is “Got the World at Your Fangs”. There lies, however, a unique folk charm in the record absent from Bateman’s prior work. I find that such a charm cements itself best on “Got the World at Your Fangs”. 

“Got the World at Your Fangs” makes you laugh and it makes you cry. “Do you love me? / Do you think of me drunk at a party?” Bateman calls out in lyrics of desperation at the onset of the chorus. Authenticity feels much needed in music’s current era and with lyrics like these Frog delivers. “Got the World at Your Fangs” feels like it reaches out to you with open arms, wrapping you in its demands to recognize the world and love that’s right in front of you. That is the world that’s at your fangs. 

“Kerosene” - yves tumor

Izzy astuto

I've loved “Kerosene” by Yves Tumor for a while. One of my friends introduced it to me our freshman year. I’ve forgotten the circumstances, but I do know it has come to mind every once in a while since. It's not really a song you can forget once you’ve heard it, with the way the instruments and vocals loudly languish their love, fizzling out at the end like a spectacular fireworks display. It came to the forefront of my brain again when one of my suitemates played it on their radio show. I remember laying in bed, scrolling through Instagram and listening to their program when the opening chords began and my head shot up. Over the next five minutes and five seconds, I found myself transported into the middle of the toxic, desperately codependent relationship Yves Tumor and Diana Gordon built. 

Concurrently, I've been going through a pseudo-breakup with the guy I've been obsessed with for the past four months. I’ve learned through my long line of failed relationships how hard it is to mourn something that never officially happened. I may feel the pain, but I have no tangible reason why I’m as torn apart as I am. But when I fall, I fall hard and fast, putting myself into too many situations where I’m basically asking to get hurt. 

When I listen to “Kerosene,” I feel like someone understands my fucked up brain. The song yearns to be loved in all the same ways I do when I check his Spotify for the fifth time that day. As the song asks its muse: “Will you be my fantasy?,” I ask him the same thing whenever we pass each other on campus, a mere glimpse of his back or nod of our heads fueling my infatuation for one day longer. This psychedelic ballad begs the listener to feel the same all-encompassing desire it emulates, and as I wait out Gordon’s choked gasps that end the song, I know I–at least–will feel it for a little while longer.

“My ordinary life” - the living tombstone

Julianna morgan

On the surface, “My Ordinary Life” (MOL) is a song about someone with a god complex bragging about his wealth and fame. But look a little deeper, and MOL is a cry for help—it’s a downward spiral into numbness and isolation, a complete inability to care or revel in the success the song’s character slaved away to achieve. Upon reaching the top, he is so detached from other people that he’s almost closer to being a “god” than a human, yet this fact brings him nothing but a vacuum of emptiness and loneliness. The lyrics go: “When you become untouchable, you’re unable to touch.” Essentially, when you’re that far removed from everyone around you, just an idol placed on a pedestal high above anything akin to warmth or genuine connection, you really do start to lose your mind. 

You start to lose who you are. 

The lyrics that best capture this idea of empty success come from one of the song’s most quoted lines: “They tell me I’m a god. / I’m lost in the facade.” It’s a line that hits you like the numbing after-sting of a slap to the face. It hurts, but dully and fadingly. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it; he’s deep in the falseness of his own identity, knowing that he’s lost but never trying to escape it. Meanwhile, everyone around him will either attempt to exploit his talents for their own wealth without caring about who he is or tell him he’s perfect, showering him with never-ending adoration built on (what he believes to be) falsehoods. 

There are multiple ways to take individual lines from the lyrics. For example, in the latter half of the song, he says: “I’m losing touch, get me? / Served on a silver platter, ask for seconds, they just let me.” Yet another way to look at it could be, “I’m losing touch. Get me served on a silver platter, ask for seconds, they just let me—”. The first can be seen as fame and wealth giving him whatever he wants to the point of him no longer being in touch with other people; the second gives the idea of his fame making him so inhuman that he is literally given out as a product of consumption to his audience and the greedy people who make money off of him. 

The question raised of “Is there a real me?” is one that has no true answer. The character of “My Ordinary Life” lives in a glamorous-yet-miserable world of impressive illusions masking internal pain. A walking, singing contradiction bearing more similarities to a superiority-inferiority complex than a god complex. 

The last line, a repeat of “I feel fear for the very last time,” gives the sense of him completely giving into this detached state of being. The attention, the money, the loneliness, the unhappiness that can’t ever be wiped away no matter how high he climbs—he accepts it all as he lets “the world just pass [him] by.” 

After all, this is now just his ordinary life.